superhuman contemplation of the universe, which is subject to change, it is true, but a change according to firm, logical, and eternal laws. Such is the influence of Frau von Stein upon Goethe, such her influence upon the loftiest expression of German thought and feeling, or, briefly, upon supreme German Classicism. Thus the dramas of the soul arise: _Iphigenie and Tasso_. In the former, a pure priestess, though of an accursed house, brings liberation, purification, happiness, not only to her family, her race, but also to the barbarians, to the world at large. In the latter, women are again the guardians of culture and morality: in the character of the princess Leonore d'Este, who had learned toleration in the hard school of sorrow, who saves the poet Tasso from false and impure instincts, "as the enchanted man is easily and gladly saved from intoxication and delusion by the presence of the divinity," Goethe has united the traits of his guardian angels, Charlotte von Stein and Louise, Duchess of Saxe-Weimar, daughter of the Landgravine Caroline of Hesse, a great woman, of whom Wieland said, she would be queen of Europe if he once were ruler of the Fates. But such exaltation, such freedom from passion could not last forever. That soul which Goethe knew so well, which "with tenacious organs holds in love and clinging lust the world in its embraces," in the course of time began to assert itself. And his intense need of sensual love was at last satisfied by Christiane Vulpius, a woman strangely inferior to the other women who had possessed his love, yet handsome, good-hearted, cheerful, natural, physically desirable, and devoted to him body and soul. Since the summer of 1788 she was really his wife, though the Church was not called upon to consecrate their union until October 19, 1806. In the high circles in which he moved, a storm of indignation was aroused by this union, which also lost for him the friendship of Frau von Stein, a loss which he deeply regretted. However, Christiane Vulpius gave him a calm and ordinary happiness that compensated him somewhat for his ideal losses; she was sufficiently dear to him to move him to the characteristic simile: "On the bank of the sea I wandered and looked for shells: in one I found a pearl, it remains well guarded in my heart;" and again the beautiful allegory of the sweet flower, brilliant as the stars, which he dug out with all the roots and carried home, where it continues to blossom. Women's love bore, from the first, quite a different character in the case of Schiller. He also had a good mother who believed in his genius and his future greatness, but born and raised in needy circumstances, and struggling with poverty all her life, she stood at an immense distance from the patrician and associate of princes, Frau Aja, the mother of Goethe.